Social Shoutout: A round-up of all things International Women’s Day, voice and video calling coming soon to Instagram & much more

Happy Friday everyone! After last week’s snow disruption and even more this week… we’re hoping that things are going to return to some normality. With the weekend nearly upon us, our weekly Social Shoutout has just landed.

This week we’re looking at International Women’s Day and the impact it had on social media, the 14 year old boy that spotted a major Instagram announcement… not yet announced by Instagram, Twitter calling on their users to suggest ideas to encourage “more civil conversation” on the platform and much more.

Facebook's #SheMeansBusiness program on International Women's Day

On International Women’s Day, Facebook launched practical tools to help professional women connect. They launched a Community Finder Tool for its #SheMeansBusiness program, which will help to connect female business owners and entrepreneurs in 23 countries. Unfortunately, it isn’t due to roll out in the UK yet, but originally launched in 2016, it is meant to help professional women share advice and resources to help them develop their businesses.

On the news feed, Facebook launched a new ‘Credit Her’ campaign which was used to highlight women both past and present, who they say, ‘didn’t get credit the first time’ They also offered themed borders for posts to help everyone celebrate International Women’s Day in their own way by crediting other inspirational women.

International Women’s Day was trending across all social media platforms and it seems it was bigger this year than ever before, even KC Comms got involved with a Blog celebrating the women in our workforce. Have a read if you haven’t already.

Brands changed social icons for International Women's Day

It was International Women’s Day on Thursday, and brands all over the world embraced the event, with many changing their social media profiles in support of #IWD2018.

In Malaysia, fried chicken giant KFC (yep, them again!) temporarily changed their famous Colonel Sanders logo to ‘Claudia Sanders’ across its social media and digital platforms.

In a statement, KFC Malaysia said: To all women of KFC and the world out there, we would like to say that your future is always bright, equal, safe and rewarding. Keep inspiring us and impacting lives, and thank you for all your hard work and contribution to our community, family and this organisation.”

In California, a branch of McDonald’s flipped its famous Golden Arches logo upside-down to make it resemble a ‘W’.

On the move, Wendy Lewis, McDonald’s chief diversity officer, said in a statement: “In celebration of women everywhere, and for the first time in our brand history, we flipped our iconic arches for International Women’s Day in honor of the extraordinary accomplishments of women everywhere and especially in our restaurants.”

It wasn’t just fast-food outlets though, with the city of Manchester also getting involved, which temporarily changed its name to Womanchester.

Voice and video calling could be coming to Instagram

Could Instagram be introducing voice and video calling features? We’ve seen it roll out across a variety of different platforms of late so it’s no surprise to see that Instagram may be adding this feature in the future. While Instagram haven’t announced this feature is coming, an update to its back-end code was spotted by user Ishan Agar (who is only 14 years old) and we know that when features like this are found in the code they do tend to drop at some point.

So why are Instagram potentially going to be rolling this out? Ultimately, Instagram have seen their direct messages significantly rise recently with over 375 million people now using Instagram DM’s each month, almost half of the app’s total audience. Alongside this Instagram have released figures that 85% of people’s DM’s go to the same 3 people which naturally means that the platform is looking to become a more intimate app which allows for immediate communication. Of course, once this finally gets announced by Instagram we’ll let you know!

Twitter needs your help!

This week, CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey, held a livestream to discuss ideas on how to its service and its user can help. The CEO identified in tweets that he acknowledges the platform has a toxic side and that they may have underestimated in the past how the platform has “real-world negative consequences”.

Twitter is asking for ideas on how to promote and measure more civil conversation and has already received ideas from a number of academics as well as their user base. The deadline for ideas is 13th April. As the platform has become a magnet for abuse over the last few years, some are surprised by the time it’s taken for Twitter to address this publically.

What have you seen happening in the world of social media? Tweet us @kccomms